[letters] [fashion] [gossip] [reviews] [birthday]

Matthew Thomas - he might well be a nice young man. But he delivers a stool of a book. | Matthew Thomas Before & After (A Novel About Exploding Sheep, Nostradamus and The End of The World) This book is... The Biggest Piece of Shit I Have Ever Read. I am not a literature critic, and I normally reserve my book-related hatred for Terry Pratchett and his army of simple-minded Physics student followers. However, when I read this book I felt that I had to let everyone know how much I hated it. Boy, how much did I hate this book! Fuck me! Whoo!
Let me quote the book for you. It seems the fairest way to damn the thing. The third sentence of the book runs along these lines. "The birds indulged in an ornithological opera that would have made Pavarotti pack up in despair." No, no it wouldn't, Matthew Thomas, you wanker. If Dr. Seuss ever got into a Telepod with a thesaurus, this is the kind of sentence that the bloated, vomiting half-creature would spit up before it rightfully died on the floor. Oh, hang on, here's the very next sentence! "Overhead, cotton wool clouds jostled for position in a cumulo-nimbus beauty contest lacking only sequinned bikinis." Did they. Did they really. Have you ever been working in a pub when someone who really thinks they're quite clever comes in? And they cannot say anything in a direct way, because they're scared that people might think - oh, Lord - that they're uninteresting or of average intelligence? I'd like you to meet Matthew Thomas. By day, he works as a flight simluation graphics designer, you know. Little pictures of planes. And that's it, really, isn't it? Apart from clouds. Staring at clouds all day, you can almost imagine them talking to him - "Matthew, don't we look like boobs? Fluffy white boobs, all soft and mothering! Don't masturbate now, Matthew. We'll see you tonight, by the railway cuttings. We like it when you wank in a hedge." Four sentences in, and I'm in trouble. I'm bristling at this sub-Blackadder drivel, and feeling quite delirious with righteous unpublished anger. Then, I see footnotes. Terry Pratchett uses footnotes. And I hate Terry Pratchett, and all who sail in him. Terry Pratchett, put bluntly, is a cunt in a hat. Here's some more snippets that made me want to gag up my middle, for simply trying too hard; "he felt more nauseous than a paté de foie gras goose on a trip to Alton Towers" "as well as possessing the body of the little known Greek goddess of Step Aerobics and the face of an adolescant angel, young Jenny had the brain of a dyslexic armadillo." "everyone turned to follow the finger of the whimpering wicker worshipper" "Adam's smirk could have outsmugged a parachute sales rep on a wingless 747" Why am I reading this book in the first place? Well, it was in those discount bookstores. This is where I go to check out who is the current pop act whose books haven't sold, like Cleopatra, Another Level, and 911, and it had a 3D cover, so someone must have had some faith in it. So, for the sake of a pound, I bought it. Never realising for a moment that my morality regarding books would eventually force me to read it. And the words you read inevitably have an effect on you, just as the food you eat effects your health. "fate hijacked proceedings faster than a 747's cargo bay full of terrorists decked out in the very latest in full-body high-explosive evening wear" (p269) I didn't even get that one. Reading this book was a more torturous process than having your arse mashed up with pincers, then having sixteen randy labradors with barbed cocks pumping lava spunk up you one by one, while Fat Jack the torturing torturer who likes to torture people - painfully - rubs a cheese grater against your nipples and breaks your ribs with a hammer. 3 out of 5